Decentralized Reputation Management for Cooperating Software Agents in Open Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) promise a new advance in distributed computing. In MAS autonomous software agents flexibly cooperate, coordinate and compete to provide the desired function(s) of such a system. If some components of a MAS fail or do not provide the desired functionality, the system is expected to autonomously deal with this situation. It is desirable to reduce occurrences of such situations by selecting trustworthy cooperation partners before cooperating with them. This becomes even more crucial in open MAS in which arbitrary heterogeneous software agents participate. In order to monitor agent behavior and enable selection of trustworthy cooperation partners, trust management services can be applied. As there is no central control in an open MAS and it is completely distributed, these services itself have to be distributed. This paper proposes a fully distributed reputation management service for open MAS based on peer-to-peer technology.